Software license compliance continues to be an important issue for both software vendors and software users. Vendors seek to insure proper compensation for providing their products while users seek to prevent liability for unauthorized use. Software asset management also continues to be an important issue for software users. Software users seek to insure they have appropriate levels of inventory so that return and/or reorder decisions can be made in a timely manner, that developers have adequate quantities of required resources, and so on. Software can be expensive. Thus, software users seek to insure that they received software they ordered and that they only pay for software they actually received.
Conventionally these three enterprise issues, and others, have been addressed individually with little, if any, integration between software license compliance logic, software asset management logic, and accounting logic. These conventional approaches have typically relied on identifiers that have been difficult to correlate, if they can be correlated at all.
An organization may employ a number of people who use a number of computing hardware devices and who run a variety of computing software applications. A discovery logic may be tasked with identifying hardware and software in use or owned by the organization. For example, a spider may crawl through an enterprise network and collect data from a ROM (Read Only Memory) BIOS (Basic Input Output System) associated with a hardware device, from a registry of software associated with a device, and so on. Unfortunately, it may be difficult, if possible at all, to correlate this instance data with license data, asset management data, accounting data, and other data available to the organization concerning the software. For example, a discovery logic may identify that two different programmers are both running an instance of the same application. The application may be identified by conventional systems using a title (e.g., word processor BrandX). However, there may be no way to identify, for example, which purchase order, if any, was used to acquire either instance.